British traveler, diplomat, writer and translator, 1821-1890, author of The Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah, Goa and the Blue Mountains, The Highlands of the Brazil, Letters from the Battle-Fields of Paraguay, Ultima Thule, The Book of the Sword and countless other works, as well as translations of Camoes and of the Arabian Nights

Fishburn and Hughes: "An eminent British scholar and explorer who, disguised as a Muslim, was the first European to penetrate the secret cities of Mecca and Medina. Burton was a man of many parts: poet, ethnologist, linguist and translator of Arabian erotica. His version of the Thousand and One Nights remains unsurpassed. Borges discusses it at some length in his essay on the translators, summarising Burton's aims as: (a) to increase his reputation as an Arabist, (b) to improve on Lane's translation, which he regarded as prosaic and bland and which he 'corrected' by expanding the erotic incidents, and (c) to interest nineteenth-century British gentlemen in Arab letters of the thirteenth century. According to Borges the last aim was incompatible with the first, given the directness of the original text and the scepticism and scholarly preferences of contemporary readership, but Burton overcame this not only by swelling the text with idiosyncratic notes, but by falsifying it with the 'richness of his English' (Etern. 108-19).

The Aleph CF 285: Burton's diplomatic career took him in 1864 to Santos, where he spent four years as Consul and wrote a book on the highlands of Brazil. The manuscript mentioned regarding Alexander’s mirror is fictitious. See Parliament of Birds." (36)